Aamir Khan shed tears to get eight-pack-abs in 'Ghajini'

New Delhi, Dec 19 (IANS) No pain, no gain. The saying couldn't be more true for Aamir Khan and the team that painstakingly sculpted those eight-pack-abs, snipped up four different hairstyles and designed the actor's varied looks in "Ghajini" that have become a rage among his fans.

"It took Aamir 13 months of workout, with a daily regime of about four hours, to achieve the next to impossible look for 'Ghajini'," Satyajit 'Satya' Chaurasia, who trained the actor for the film, told IANS.

"He used to get tired exercising and sometimes even used to shriek in pain and cry doing the stomach crunches, but he did not skip a single day. Every week his body used to show results and that kept him going," added Satya.

Getting eight-pack-abs was not a cakewalk for "perfectionist" Aamir. Other than rigorous workouts, the actor also had to go through the pain of "a disciplinary regime of following a proportionate balanced diet."

"He had to give up on oil, sugar and alcohol consumption and late night parties as I strictly asked him to sleep for eight hours at a stretch before the workouts," said Chaurasia.

Releasing Dec 25, "Ghajini" is the much-hyped Hindi remake of director A.R. Murugadoss' Tamil hit with the same name. The film was simultaneously released in Telugu in 2005.

While the original "Ghajini" featured southern actor Surya Sivakumar along with actress Asin Thottumkal, Murugadoss cast Aamir to play the main lead in the Hindi remake and repeated Asin in the remake.

Apart from his physique, what has also been the talk of the town is Aamir's scarred and buzzed off hair in the forthcoming film.

"The buzzed hair style is given to suit both Aamir's character and him as a person. It's basically for the second half of the film where he has a situation that requires him to shave off his hair.

"It took us around an hour and a half to give him the look and get the scar lines on his head with thickness variations as per the director," revealed Avan Contractor, hairstylist for the actor in the film.

"We took liberty with the lines on his head and tweaked the look a little bit from the original 'Ghajini', where the actor has only one big scar," she added.

On being asked how she managed to give the actor numerous hairstyles for the song "Behka behka", Contractor said: "The song was shot over a period of five days and we had to work with Aamir's hair, whatever he had at that time. We just dressed it up differently and played around with it."

To spice up Aamir's multiple avatars in the film, stylist Arjun Bhasin was roped in to design "realistic" but "fashionable" costumes for him.

"He plays a corporate executive who is very rich. So his corporate look is stylish. However, at the same time, it is very realistic. He sports a casual office look, but with a quirky edge to it," Bhasin said.

The stylist also predicts that Aamir's business look from the film will inspire people to change their wardrobe.

"There are many elements from Aamir's corporate look that people are going to adapt in their lives like short sleeves, slim ties and waistcoats with lapels," he said.

"His other looks in the film are only in a song that are fantasies," he added.

Bhasin also said the film didn't require much going into books for Aamir's dresses.

" 'Ghajini' is one of my few films where not much research has gone into the costumes. It was a very organic process that Aamir and I went through. We read the script and decided to just work upon it. All we knew was that his looks should be attractive and at the same time meaningful."